kbAlertz are now producing RSS feeds for new knowledge base articles which is an excellent idea and something MS should really have done themselves. This is the second bit of interesting news I’ve had from kbAlertz with the first being the breaking news about MS’s approach to the Internet Explorer spoofing problem.
Update Well it would be good if the pages that they linked to didn’t come back with a 404 🙁
Update2 The first feed I looked at was the security feed and this had no articles, hence no data, hence a 404 – an oversight perhaps? I’ve sent an email to their support address to let them know about the problem.
Update3 Looks like they wont get the email as they are using Declude junkmail filtering. It detected that our isp’s mailserver is not in our domains mx records (which it wouldn’t be) and also their own mx server is not in mx records either – its therefore (i presume) junked the mail. Sounds like someone needs to properly configure their anti-spam protection.
One of users installed the Microsoft Virtual PC software on their laptop. Minutes later the entire LAN stopped working with users being disconnected from all servers they were connected to. My first thought was that the hub(s) had died but they looked ok with lights flashing merrily. Trying to ping an ip address on the network was returning the correct ip some of the time and returning a “destination host unreached” from a particular ip address on the network. This wasn’t a hub/router or anything -this is when we found the ip address was the computer that had Microsoft Virtual PC installed on it – at the same time the network died.
We rebooted the pc and it just hangs at the welcome screen with no attempt to log on or provide the ctrl-alt-delete option. Rebooting into safe mode I thought I would uninstall the application. However when you try to uninstall it you get the message “The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. You may be running in safe mode or Windows Installer may not be correctly installed.” Looking at technet and google gives no clue, apart from running a command after you’ve rebooted normally (not available as it won’t reboot normally!).
I then ran msconfig, selected base mode startup and rebooted. This allowed me to get into the pc. I then started the Windows installer service, ignoring the errors about plug and play services not being installed. I was then able to uninstal the Virtual pc software. Set msconfig back to standard mode and rebooted…..and was unable to log back in 🙁
Incidentally this network outage really confused my Word2003 and it complained about not being able to autosave. After clicking ok to several buttons it then prompted me to send the report to Microsoft. I did and it told me there were updates to Office 2003 – and the one available was to prevent Word becoming unresponsive when trying to autosave! So its definately worth keeping an eye out on the Office update page
Update Fixed the swine software. The machine was refusing to boot unless I went into safe mode and did not select Networking option. This led me to another conclusion that there was something wrong with the networking side still (after having uninstalled the virtual machine software). Sure enough, under device manager, each network card appeared – twice – the standard one and a virtual one. However trying to delete the network drivers produced a message “this device is needed to reboot the machine – go away ha ha ha” or words to that effect. I therefore disabled them (which to me is almost the same as deleting them), rebooted into normal mode and the machine logged on. I then tried to delete the devices again – same problem. At this point I didn’t have an ip address on the network card so I looked at the network card properties – and there was a “microsoft virtual network” component. Uninstalling this gave the message “this will delete from your entire system – are you sure” at which point I started to gain some hope back, and the chance of leaving the office tonight instead of having to rebuild a laptop….. As soon as I hit yes, I got the popup to say I was connected to the network, an ip address and no trace of the swine virtual pc software on the machine.
Now all I have to do is create a group policy to stop users attempting to install this software on any machine anywhere. 🙂
Microsoft have a Virtual PC 2004 45-Day Free Trial Edition download available.
I was listening to a Microsoft technet seminar yesterday and they had some good advice on installing ServicePack4. They said to copy across msconfig.exe from a WindowsXP machine, Boot the w2k machine and run msconfig.exe. Select the services tab and then select Hide Microsoft Services. You are then left with all Non-MS software. Select disable all. Select the startup tab and disable all of these ones too. When you next reboot you will be left with a “clean” install of Windows. You should then be able to install ServicePack 4 (or whatever) without anti-virus or other software clashing or interfering with the install. Hopefully this will help out Barbier who posted a question on my previous post about Service Pack 4 installs.
Trying to install the .net framework 1.1 setup program so I can then install intravnews on the laptop. However when I try to run the program I get the error message “Error 1325.’andrew.helsby’ is not a valid short file name.” The filename referred to is my username on the computer. A search in google does not help as there are lots of similar problems but no definite answer on how to fix it. Ironically the solution in technet is that its a fault in the msi file and that a patch should be installed on the pc of the producer of the msi file!
Update By logging on as another user on the computer I was able to install the patch. The weird thing is that the other user also doesn’t fit the 8.3 username format either.
Microsoft have a short url for their protection page – just go to www.microsoft.com/protect for advice on protecting your pc with firewalls, updates and anti-virus software. Useful link, for beginners, because one of the options is “how do I know what operating system I have” – as so many times I hear I am running Word, or Microsoft or Windows. The advice on firewall’s links to the new ComputerAssociates firewall that I blogged about earlier too.
Thanks to a tip off from Kase it is possible to use a Microsoft page to search security and hotfixes to see what patches are available for a particular product/platform.
If you go to the Microsoft Office homepage in Phoenix it tells you that you need to be running ie5.01 (which isn’t supported by Microsoft anymore!) or Netscape Navigator 6 or later. NOw I would have thought Phoenix is later than NN6 as it comes from the same source originally (i’m sure Neil will correct me if i’m wrong). So you click on the “more information on supported browsers” where they pop up a message saying people may get problems even when using a supported browser. Then asks you if this page helped. When you say No it asks you WHY ….after selecting “information is wrong” the Next button doesn’t do anything. Unfortunately if you use ie6 then you are unlikely to see the error message and therefore can’t go through the wizard.
Microsoft’s technet website is getting worse and worse. I searched on the technet site for 0x00000050 and it came back with no results found. Search all of Microsoft and it comes back with 4 results plus links to more results (4 of them). NONE of these results brings back article A “Stop 0x00000050” Error Message Occurs During an Upgrade from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000. Surely the Indexing service should find results. They can’t disable number searches as most of MS errors will have a number to query against (otherwise whats the point in putting in on the screen in the first place?) If you use the google interface and search for 0x00000050 it returns 1790 results with the first 3 being different microsoft articles all with 0x00000050 in the subject.
Scoble has an interesting and amusing article about all those people who hate Microsoft. Apparently Microsoft want people to blog and talk in newsgroups about their hated things in Longhorn so that Microsoft get a chance to address the issues before the software ships.